The Place Where Nightmares are Made
by Cynical-Smile01
Summary: It haunted his dreams. No matter how much time had passed, it lingered at the back of his mind, never leaving him. The screams at night reminded him it would never really be over. So he had to see it for himself.
1. The First Time

**The First Time**

He had been lying to himself. He told himself, it was in the past, it was over. But it could never be over. No, no matter how much time had gone by it would still haunt his nightmares. It was branded into his memories.

He was a Gryffindor, or so the Sorting Hat had told him. Yet he knew deep down that he was guilty of cowardice. It took a long time for him to be ready to go back. Back to the place he only knew about from Harry's screams in the night.

The odd rasping noise that came from his throat startled Moaning Myrtle, but Ron carried on. If he stopped he wouldn't be able to go on. He swung his leg over the broom he had taken from the storage shed. He didn't need Fawkes there to carry him up this time.

The slimy tunnel hadn't changed since they had been down here last, but at least the descent was gentler. His mind shut down, it didn't want to process what he was seeing, but he forced himself to go on. He needed to see.

The dimly lit passages hid the true size of the passage from sight. He clambered over the rocks caused by his old wand. The gap that once had been large enough for both Harry and Ginny to get through seemed tiny for his much larger frame. He pressed on.

The second door, the one he hadn't reached before. He hadn't got this far last time. Dozens of beady eyes stared at him, as if they were alive. It wasn't hard to work out what was needed. And so, valiantly, he moved onwards.

On the other side of the circular door was a very long chamber. He scrambled through the opening. The towering pillars of carved stone seemed to stare at him as they cast shadows on the floor through the green gloom of the chamber.

He hesitated. He knew the basilisk was long gone, but there was that small part of him that couldn't accept that the creature wouldn't sneak up on him. But he was a Weasley, he hadn't come this far to back out.

It was the smell that hit him first. It wasn't surprising really. After all, a giant snake that's been dead two years isn't likely to smell great. The half rotten flesh was still there at the other end of the Chamber, still so snake like.

_"Ginny! Ginny! Don't be dead! Please don't be dead! Ginny, please wake up." _

Ron knew the screams. Harry would sometimes start screaming about the Chamber in his sleep. It wasn't hard to imagine his little sister in front of him, lying motionlessly pale, with her red hair fanned out on the floor.

There in front of the bust of Salazar Slytherin and the basilisk corpse was a blood stain. Did it belong to his baby sister, or was it his best friend who had caused the red to stay there for all eternity? A human shouldn't bleed that much.

The puddle of ink that Harry had told them came from the diary. Even after two years it still was there, not evaporated to leave just a stain as the blood had. The ink that his sister had used to pour her heart into the very thing that had possessed her.

Ron never blamed Ginny. It was never her fault. He blamed Lucius Malfoy for handing her the diary, he blamed Tom Riddle for making the diary, but he could never blame Ginny.

It hadn't failed to escape his notice that whenever his best mate seemed to face You-Know-Who he was never there. Maybe that's why he came here. He wanted to see for himself what his mate had seen. To see the place he only knew from screams in the night.

And what he saw scared him more than you could imagine. Reality swam with the past as he stood in the place where, if not for Harry, You-Know-Who would have taken Ginny's life for his own. Where, if not for Fawkes, Harry would have died saving Ginny.

Ronald Weasley was never a coward. But for the first time in his life he turned and ran.


	2. The Second Time

**The Second Time**

He hadn't consciously decided to walk there, but somehow he found himself outside the girls' bathroom on the second floor. He needed somewhere to process everything that had happened before he would return to the chaos that was the Burrow.

Moaning Myrtle looked suspicious as he walked into the bathroom and opened the Chamber. He didn't need a broom this time, his wand would be enough. It still wasn't a pleasant experience descending into the cavern beneath.

It never failed to scare him that the Chamber had been built for the sole purpose of killing children because of who there parents were, or weren't. That a thousand years on people were still fighting over the same meaningless argument divides the Wizarding World.

It hadn't changed since he had last been down here, though maybe there were a few more rodent skeletons that had appeared over the preceding year. The passageway was just as gloomy, illuminating the basilisk skin in all the wrong ways.

The basilisk was even more decomposed than last time, but the ink puddle remained. But nothing mattered. He just wanted to be alone. He wanted to be able to get it through his thick head that he had seen a man die. The Chamber seemed perfect for that.

Sirius was no angel, yet he stood up for what was right even with the pressure he was under from his family. He was the best of us, in that respect. Was this really the same man who had spent the past year hiding in the very house he grew up in?

And then he thought about Harry, who had through even more but was forced to keep living. Ron wasn't stupid. He knew that Harry was hurting deep inside from the double loss of his Godfather and the promise of the first real home that he would know.

He himself had never realised how hard it must have been for Harry to watch from the sidelines as he saw the Weasley family with the only thing he had ever wanted: love. Ron sunk to the floor as he thought about the pain that had almost come from that love.

"Back again, Ronald?"

There, walking regally towards him was the aged Headmaster with a sort of sad smile on his face. There was sympathy to his tone. But, as Ron thought, how could the great Albus Dumbledore know what it was like to almost lose someone you love?

Ron didn't even bother to look back. He continued to stare at the puddle of ink by his feet. "Again, sir?" He inquired tentatively, "I don't quite know what you mean?"

"Oh, I think you do. I don't need an invisibility cloak to remain undetected, Mr Weasley."

Ron whipped his head round in horror at that statement. A brief smile graced Dumbledore's face.

"You see, last year, not long after Harry returned from the maze, young Myrtle approached me in quite a state." He said softly, "She told of a red-headed boy coming into her bathroom and speaking in parseltongue, before descending into the Chamber. There are not many students who know the true horror of what occurred here." There was a short pause before Professor Dumbledore added knowingly, "I wondered how long it would be before you would come back."

He though for a second before he replied quietly, "He almost killed my sister, sir. He ordered the deaths of my uncles. He destroyed Harry's entire family."

Dumbledore swept gracefully to sit on the floor beside him. "But that's not what's troubling you." That was a statement, not a question.

"No sir," He admitted. Then his voice changed to a pleading, frightened tone, "I watched a man die, sir. I watched as my friends were tortured. Why am I not feeling anything?"

"It's not weak to admit when you are scared. I, myself, remember quaking in my boots before my first duel. Maybe you are trying to forget what you saw because it scares you?"

"There is going to be a war, isn't there sir."

"My dear Ronald, the war has already started. Believe me, Mr Black is not the first, nor will he be the last person to die fighting Voldemort."

"My family are marked, aren't they sir? We aren't all going to make it, are we?"

"I cannot say. But yes, Mr Weasley, your family has been marked since before I was around. Which, based on the students' betting pool, is 200 years last time I checked. I believe Messrs Fredrick and George Weasley placed that one." Ron smirked at that statement.

The odd pair sat in silence for a few minutes before Ron had the courage to open his mouth. "Sir?" A pause. "What really happened down here? What did it do to my little sister?"

"It possessed her. It took control of her body and used it for unspeakable acts. The only thing Miss Weasley can be grateful for is that her attacker did not have a permanent body or the mental and physical damage would have been much worse, I'm sure."

"She still has nightmares about it." He confessed. "Sometimes she will wake up in the middle of the night screaming, but she refuses to talk about it. Harry never got over it either. He'll start muttering 'Please don't be dead Ginny' in his sleep, and it hurts because I know how close I came to losing her."

Ron thought he saw pain flash across the Professor's eyes. "The pain will never go. Yes, it will decrease, but it will stay forever. It has changed you, not just your sister and Harry. I'm sure Miss Granger also bears lingering reminders of that year as well." Professor Dumbledore peered over his half moon glasses at Ron. "It saddens me to know that you and your friends have been through so much more than should be expected of a child, yet even more is still expected. What happened at the Ministry will not be the end of your trials, and I fear we still have a very long road to travel before it will all be over." Professor Dumbledore made to leave.

"Sir, can I ask one more thing?"

"Of course, dear boy."

Ron gestured towards the blood stain on the stone flooring. "Whose blood was that?"

Dumbledore's eyes filled with sorrow as they looked at the stain, then back to Ron's face. There was an awful look of regret in his eyes as he said, "That Ronald, I do not know." Then he swept from the Chamber with as much dignity as he had entered with.

Ron just sat there as he let tears slide down his cheeks.


	3. The Third Time

**The Third Time**

He had wanted to go to the Room of Requirement. It would have been more comfortable. But he couldn't. Even if the Room was still functional, he needed somewhere that nobody could find him. There were too many people in the main body of the school.

Yet it wasn't a school anymore, was it? It was a battlefield where the blood of children had been spilt, defending those who hadn't stood up to defend themselves. Blood stained the flagstone floor of the Great Hall, just like it did in the Chamber.

The last time he had been here he had told Dumbledore that his family wouldn't all make it out of the war alive, and he was right. That conversation, that small exchange, it felt like a lifetime ago.

He didn't know what to expect when he had brought Hermione down here earlier. He hadn't told her where he was going when he disappeared those few times. She was shaking as he whispered the imitation parseltongue in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. It was to be expected really. After all, the last time she heard something like that was probably right before she was petrified.

Walking the familiar path he almost forgot that Hermione had never seen the Chamber at all. She was quaking like a leaf on the Whomping Willow, but she had that look in her eyes, like when she got all riled up about spew. She's a Gryffindor to the core. His Gryffindor.

It's weird, he thought. He didn't have any happy memories of this place, it's still a place where he would come when he wanted to ponder life and just generally feel depressed. But it's also where he first kissed Hermione. That juxtaposition, as Hermione would put it, messed with Ron's head.

The basilisk corpse was almost completely decomposed. At least the venom was still in the fangs. The plan would have been all for naught if it had dried up. But all that's over with now. He told himself that he could just let go and let his body surrender.

28 hours he had been on his feet. Was it just yesterday that he had been sneaking out of Shell Cottage with a goblin and a Bellatrix Lestrange lookalike to break into the safest place in Britain? So much had changed since then.

His own brother lay upstairs in the rows upon rows of the dead. There'd be a monument, he guessed. Where his brother's final sacrifice was remembered by just an engraving on a plinth. Fred deserved more than that. They all did.

"You down here drowning your sorrows as well, big brother?"

Ron turned towards the direction of the very familiar voice. His baby sister stood there with a bottle of Old Ogdens in one hand and an unfamiliar labelled bottle in the other. She was one of the few who could still stand to be counted, yet, they were all injured, he thought, even if you couldn't see it.

"Don't have any booze. You willing to share?"

Ginny plonked herself next to Ron, conjured a tumbler and filled it to the top with firewhiskey. "That should be enough to get you properly sloshed, Ronnie." Ron took the glass, inclined his head and glass slightly towards her, and then gulped as much as he could in one mouthful. "That bad, eh?"

"Probably not as bad as you. It's mostly to dull the pain." He pulled back his sleeve to show a deep wound that still hadn't been tended. "I can't pull mum away from…from…well, you know, to heal it. Madam Pomfrey still hasn't finished with those who can't stand yet"

"Cry baby, I've seen people make less of a fuss being flogged!" She laughed. It was only because of the alcohol that she even let that slip, and Ron knew it.

"WHAT!" Then he thought for a bit, "Never mind. I don't even want to know yet. I guess we both have our stories to share."

"I guess the press are going to want those stories when we resurface, aren't they?"

"They'll be all over us. I do hope they have the sense to tread carefully, but somehow I doubt it."

"I'm not ready to talk about it yet. They'll ask us things like how we plan to move on, but I don't think I _can _move on." Ginny started slugging back the muggle bottle marked "Vodka" even more than she had been.

"Well, Ginnikins, you have your wonderful big brothers to stop them, hey. One look from Bill and they'll stay well away, so cheer up. Just think of the look on Rita's face when they let us loose." Ginny smirked slightly.

"She won't know what hit her. And then, I can bat bogey her smarmy face."

"That's the attitude Gin!"

The siblings sat in silence for a while, only pausing from drinking to refill their glasses.

"Do you think that this burning will ever go?" She slurred as she pointed at her chest after a bit. "This pain. Colin, Dean, Lavender, Parvati, _Fred_, Remus, Tonks, oh Melin, even Jack Sloper. All of them, all gone."

"No, I don't think it will."

"We were all ready to die. We've been ready since September. But we didn't think that any of us would live." Ginny stared into nothingness. "I think it is worse – having to be the ones who live. At least, if you die, that's it."

Ron swilled the remaining firewhiskey round his tumbler. "Last time I was down here, I bumped into Dumbledore of all people."

"What were you doing down here?" Ginny asked astounded. "How did you get in even, I never thought."

"It was after the Ministry. I wanted just to hide somewhere that no-one would come. As for how I got in, well, Harry talks in his sleep, and when you spend 7 years sharing a room with someone, let's just say, I've heard quite a bit. Sometimes he'll sleep talk in parseltongue. I've picked up a few words."

"Full of surprises, Ronald Weasley."

"There are many things you don't know about me Gingin. Anyway, me and Dumbledore had a chat. We talked about how your mind stops things from seeming real; we talked about how I knew we wouldn't all survive. And then I asked whose blood that was" Ron pointed at the bloodstain. Ginny made an odd spluttering noise as she realised exactly what bloodstain he was referring to. "And he didn't know. But he had that awful look in his eyes, like he was incredibly sad. I didn't understand at the time, but I do now. He was sad at the thought that there would be even more blood spilt. That I, the boy he was talking to, might not make it alive. He didn't want anymore people to die. Especially not children."

"We're not children anymore Ronnie. You might still have a bit of innocence, but at Hogwarts, even 14 year olds are no longer children. Dennis Creevey was no less of an adult than McGonagal."

"He shouldn't have needed to be an adult. None of us should've had to grow up so fast. Dumbledore knew that, but he couldn't do anything to stop it."

"_Dumbledore_" she said, her voice dripping with malice "had no right to think that we shouldn't die when we _both_ know he had been moulding Harry as a weapon since the minute he walked into this castle."

Ron considered this for a second, before asking sadly, "Whatever happened Gin? Do you remember when we were little, our story books? Where it was goodies vs. baddies? When did the world stop being black and white?"

"It stopped being that simple when I was eleven."


End file.
